Meirav Ong

JUDITH | A DANCE FILM BY WELL OF WILLS COLLECTIVE

About the film

This short dance film was developed with a group of interdisciplinary artists over the course of a weekend-long performance workshop at Arts on Site, Kerhonkson, NY. The workshop centered the mythological Jewish heroine, Judith, who seduces and beheads her enemy to save her people from annihilation. As a collective, we imagined and embodied the resources that would have empowered us to act as Judith did in order to finally put an end to oppression: Rage, Seduction, Faith, Prayer and Ritual. 

We conceived this choreography as an invocation composed of the rage, seduction, prayer, and ancestral trauma excavated in this research. In this ensemble of female-identifying and non-binary warriors we see a prismatic portrait of a woman warrior encompassing the voice-less rage of her matrilineal ancestors. Judith shows how pain can be transmuted into collective action in the name of radical change.